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A Conversation with P'arang
by P'arang
I want to dedicate this dharma talk to fathers. It is hard to be a good father these days. Our children live in worlds that are unfamiliar and shift faster than we can say manga. We can’t protect them from the Internet and its predators; we can’t protect them from bullies or fast cars or drugs that are only now being designed. All we can do is our utmost to provide safe homes and ethical guidance and then pray for the best.
In the meantime sometimes it feels like the whole world is trying to seduce us away from the tasks of parenthood. Sex, and sexual innuendo are everywhere; no job is secure; drugs and alcohol can call our name…and so can the pretty young neighbor across the street.
What’s a dad to do? Let me say here that all men are fathers. You may not literally be a father but every time you are in the presence of a child who is planning to steal something from Target, you become, in that moment…that kid’s dad. You are a dad when you coach, when you congratulate any child for anything, when you secretly pay someone’s way through college.
It took me a while to find a sutra aimed at fathers but, thank Buddha, there is one. Its official title is The Getting Rid of Cares and Troubles Sutra. To be the fathers we want to be we need to do just that, get rid of cares and troubles. Here are the seven behaviors the Buddha offered up to show us how to do it. They are: getting rid of cares and troubles through insight; getting rid of them by restraint; only using things they were designed for; endurance; avoidance of things that can harm us; dispersal of negative thinking; and heedfulness.
Getting rid of cares and troubles through insight is about letting go of trains of thought that don’t do us any good. Buddha offered a specific listing:
Did I exist in the past?
Did I not exist in the past?
What was I in the past?
Shall I exist in the future?
What shall I be in the future?
How shall I be in the future?
Am I?
Am I not?
What am I?
How am I?
You get the picture. The instructions are clear: stop the questioning. You are missing your life.
Restraint is also pretty clear. If we don’t restrain ourselves from too much of….anything…how can we be available to our children? The answer is we can’t. If I have too much sugar, for example, the next day I have a hangover. I’m groggy, tired, and easily irritated. I even, by now, know where the line is: the third cookie or more than one scoop if ice cream. So I’m learning to stop where I need to, not just for my own sake, although feeling nauseated when we are doing prostrations at six am sucks, but more for the sake of the people who need to spend their days near me. This includes children.
I’m guessing all of us have at least one story about what happens when we use something inappropriately. I’ve run into this one a lot since I was raised by a mother who was a master at jerryrigging things. People tell me that is what happens to people when they become responsible for creating sets for plays, which is what she was doing, at least during my late teens. The story that stands out though, comes from a trip I took with some friends to Costa Rica to hike. After a long morning of hiking around the skirt of a volcano one of us, I swear it wasn’t me, suggested that we try putting the mud on our faces as face masks. It had a thick, smooth consistency. Surely it would be good for our skin. Putting it on was ok. The mud was cool. And it tightened just the way that face masks tighten. The problem was that we couldn’t get it off. We ended up having to hike into the nearest town for help, trying to ignore the belly laughs that followed us to the pharmacy. There we needed what smelled like paint remover to get the mud off of our faces. This meant, for a couple of us, that our faces broke out into red blotches, and for the truly unlucky, welts. Please consider yourself warned.
Being a good father means signing up for the long haul. It means endurance. When a child needs a hug, a child needs a hug. By my guesstimate, a child will need 10,000 hugs before he or she is ten…..and an equal amount when they reemerge out of their teen worlds. When a child is sick, there is no knowing when he/she will get better. And we need to plan accordingly. Because we’re the dad and that’s part of the job description.
Buddha listed specific things to avoid: a savage, an elephant, a horse, a bull, a questionable dog, a snake, dirty pools, and unseemly places. Parents need to avoid particular places, people and things. We know who and what they are. The friends who make us feel guilty when we need to go home to our children. The poker, or internet, game that we can’t stop. Anything that muddles our mind. The born-to-flirt neighbor, assistant,sister-in-law, “friend”. If we had to, you and I could name every one of these. Please don’t pretend you can’t.
Dispersal is another clear instruction from Buddha. Don’t tolerate thoughts of violence, ill-will or unwholesomeness. Period.
Finally, we need to be as heedful as we can be about how we live our lives, because our children are learning to imitate how we are, not what we say.
Can we do all these things? Of course. All the time? Nope. Here’s the secret punchline to the sutra. Even trying , just doing our best, make us ”glad at heart.” Buddha promised. Smack in the middle of that “glad at heart” is a wonderful parent.
